Automakers and tech companies are pushing a bill through Congress that would handcuff local governments’ ability to regulate self-driving vehicles on city streets. Now city transportation officials are demanding a role in drafting legislation before it’s too late.

Legislation is moving quickly through Congress. The House of Representatives held a June 27 subcommittee hearing on a package of 14 bills regulating self-driving cars, then consolidated them into a single bill, which a House subcommittee voted for last week 54-0. The bill is on its way to the House floor while the Senate prepares similar legislation.

The House bill, HR 3388, would allow each car manufacturer to test up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles on public roads, a 40-fold increase from the 2,500 allowed today. Vehicle manufacturers would self-certify their autonomous vehicles with the U.S. Department of Transportation, without an independent review of the technology’s safety.

The bill would also prohibit state and local governments from regulating the “design, construction, mechanical systems, hardware and software systems, or communications systems” of autonomous vehicles. That would render the more hands-on regulations in states like California obsolete.

The “Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets,” which is backed by the tech and auto industries, argues the legislation is a key step to forming a “single, national framework for self-driving vehicles.”

But the bill has raised red flags with city officials, environmental watchdogs, and advocates for safe walking and biking. Transportation for America, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and the National League of Cities have banded together to oppose H.R. 3388 in its current form.

“The draft bill handcuffs our transportation leaders, revoking their ability to unlock the transformative potential from this innovative technology,” NACTO said in a statement. “This is akin to trusting the fox to protect the hen house, and would clear the way for automakers and tech companies to deploy hundreds of thousands of automated vehicles without adhering to stringent safety standards.”

Representatives for cities haven’t been at the table as the regulations take shape. The legislation may mean that cities lose “the ability to regulate their own roads,” according to Russell Brooks at Transportation for America.

Another big concern is the vagueness of the bill’s language, which leaves too much room for interpretation. The bill prohibits the sale of fully autonomous vehicles, for example, but according to Brooks that could leave open the possibility that unproven technology will be used by the general public as part of a commercial “testing scenario,” like the one Waymo launched earlier this year in Arizona.

The city-aligned coalition is calling for better representation and transparency. The groups want guaranteed seats for state and local governments on the automated vehicle advisory council proposed in the House bill, and a legal mandate that data on self-driving car performance will be open to the public.

The federal government hands states about $40 billion a year for transportation, money they can basically spend however they want. The result in many places is a lot of expensive, traffic-inducing highways that get clogged with cars soon after they’re finished. Can measuring the effect of all this spending lead to better decisions?

US DOT is developing a metric to assess how well states address congestion. This is a minefield — if the new congestion rule only measures the movement of cars, it’s going to entrench 60 years of failed transportation policy. Unfortunately, the first draft of the DOT rule left a lot to be desired.

Reformers have been pushing the agency to revise the rule so it takes a broader, multi-modal view of congestion. Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America reports 19 senators and 48 US representatives have written a letter to US DOT [PDF] demanding a healthier approach.

The Congress members write:

If we focus, as this proposed rule does, on keeping traffic moving at high speeds at all times of day on all types of roads and streets, then the result is easy to predict: states and MPOs will prioritize investments to increase average speeds for cars, at the expense of goals to provide safe, reliable, environmentally sensitive, multi-modal transportation options for all users of the transportation system, despite those goals being stated in federal statute. This singular focus on moving vehicles undermines the progress this Administration has made on multi-modal planning and investments through the TIGER program. Encouraging faster speeds on roadways undermines the safety of roads for all users, as well as the economic vitality of our communities.

The excessive congestion performance measure should be amended to assess people hours of delay and not just vehicles. This change is critical to account for the many non-single occupancy vehicle users, including transit bus riders and bicyclists and pedestrians traveling along the corridor, which provide critical congestion relief and could be undercounted or even penalized under this measure.

The letter also insists that U.S. DOT require state and regional transportation agencies to assess the impact of projects on greenhouse gas emissions.

US DOT is currently accepting comments about the rule change. You can weigh in and help promote a better policy.

The Obama administration has released new rules governing transportation planning. Despite rumors the new rules would be a big step forward, for example requiring states to take things like greenhouse gas pollution into effect, instead they appear to be more of the same-old.

US DOT isn’t taking steps to hold transportation agencies accountable for building ecological disasters like the Katy Freeway. Image from Top 10 Famous.

Reformers hoped the rules would get states to reconsider highway expansion as a method of dealing with congestion and emissions, since widening roads induces more traffic and pollution. By introducing better metrics and reporting requirements, the thinking goes, US DOT could compel states to document the failure of highway expansion, which would lead to pressure for a new approach.

But the rules released yesterday are a big disappointment, say analysts. While it will take a bit more time to fully assess the 423-page document [PDF], advocates are already going on the record panning US DOT’s effort.

Greenhouse gas emissions

On the question of whether state transportation agencies should be required to at least report the emissions impact of their transportation plans, US DOT “whiffed,” writes Joe Cortright at City Observatory:

There’s nothing with any teeth here. Instead — in a 425 page proposed rule — there are just six pages (p. 101-106) addressing greenhouse gas emissions that read like a bad book report and a “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse for doing nothing now. Instead, DOT offers up a broad set of questions asking others for advice on how they might do something, in some future rulemaking, to address climate change.

This is hugely disappointing, considering that anonymous Obama administration officials were bragging about the impact of these reporting requirements to Politico earlier this week. At the rate things are going, half of Florida will be under water before American transportation officials acknowledge that spending billions to build enormous highways serving suburban sprawl is broiling the planet.

Traffic congestion

There was also some hope that US DOT would reform the way congestion is measured. Current measures of congestion emphasize vehicle delay, which leads to policies that actually promote more driving and more total time spent in cars, as agencies seek to temporarily reduce delay by widening roads. Policies that reduce traffic by improving transit or enabling people to live closer to work don’t rate well under this measure of congestion.

Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America says the new rule “would still push local communities to waste time and money attempting to build their way out of congestion by using a measure of traffic congestion that’s narrow, limited and woefully out of date.”

Cortright says the metric could have been worse, but it’s still measuring the wrong things:

The core measure of whether a metropolitan area is making progress in addressing its congestion problem is what USDOT calls “annual hours of excessive delay per capita.” This congestion measure essentially sets a baseline of 35 mph for freeways and 15 mph for other roads. If cars are measured to be traveling more slowly than these speeds, the additional travel time is counted as delay. The measure calls for all delay hours to be summed and then divided by the number of persons living in the urbanized portion of a metropolitan area.

The proposed measure is, in some senses, an improvement over other measures (like the Texas Transportation Institute’s Travel Time Index) that compute delay based on free flow traffic speeds (which in many cases exceed the posted speed limit)…

—This is all about vehicle delay, not personal delay. So a bus with 40 or 50 passengers has its vehicle delay weighted the same amount according to this metric as a single occupancy vehicle.

—This ignores the value of shorter trips. As long as you are traveling faster than 15 miles per hour or 35 on freeways, no matter how long your trip is, the system is deemed to be performing well.

When you get down to it, US DOT’s congestion metric belongs to the same line of thinking that led Houston to spend $2.8 billion widening the Katy Freeway to 23 lanes only to see traffic congestion return with a vengeance a few years later. Instead of managing demand for freeways, it will lead to more supply.

California has shifted away from an emphasis on vehicle delay and instead uses “Vehicle Miles Traveled” as a performance measure. VMT measures how much traffic a given project will add to streets and highways. US DOT is nowhere close to such an enlightened position.

Biking and walking

Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists also notes another big disappointment.

US DOT releases draft perf. measure for performance of major roads. Doesn't include any measure for bike/ped! @BikeLeague

Now for the good news. This process isn’t over yet. The rule can be amended — and anyone can weigh in. The comment period will open Friday and will likely be open through the summer. US DOT needs to be inundated with comments that call for a modern approach to measuring transportation system performance.

It’s worth noting that US DOT officials are touting this rule — which took three years to draft — as environmental progress. Gregory Nadeau wrote on the Fast Lane Blog:

This is a down payment on the administration’s 21st Century Clean Transportation Plan, a budget proposal to reduce traffic and carbon intensity of the transportation sector.

What gives? Well, you can trace this phrase — and the basis of some engineers’ reluctance to stripe crosswalks — to one very influential but seriously flawed study from the 1970s.

In 1972, a researcher named Bruce Herms conducted a study of crosswalk safety in San Diego. He found that intersections with marked crosswalks had higher injury rates than ones with unmarked crosswalks. He concluded that marked crosswalks should only be installed where they are “warranted” because they can give pedestrians a “false sense of security,” encouraging risky behavior.

But there were problems with the study. For one, Herms didn’t actually study why people made certain decisions at crosswalks — that “false sense of security” was just speculation on his part.

Since the Herms study, other studies have refuted his conclusions, including work produced by the FHWA. Nevertheless, the influence of his research from more than 40 years ago persists. As backward as it seems, engineers still refuse to install crosswalks on the grounds that it would harm pedestrian safety. Just a few years ago, for instance, the “false sense of security” argument was deployed to shoot down requests for midblock crossings in Los Angeles.

Bill Schultheiss, an engineer with the Toole Design Group and member of the bike and pedestrian committee of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devises, is critical of the Herms study.

“When I first came into engineering, I heard a lot about this idea of pedestrians having a false sense of security when in marked crosswalks,” he said. “And I just believed it.”

But then Schultheiss ordered a print copy of the study to review it.

“I think it was biased,” he said, like much of the older regulations. “I don’t know, was it him or just the culture at the time.”

“His conclusions were terrible.”

For example, Herms found that of the pedestrians who were struck, most were hit in the middle or near the end of the crosswalk, not at the beginning. This is a pattern that suggests motorists are failing to yield to people who have already established themselves in the crosswalk, not that people are stepping off the curb inattentively.

“If you make it three quarters of the way across the street, you expect cars to stop,” Schultheiss said. “That’s the law.”

Despite the absence of evidence to back it up, the idea that crosswalks encourage pedestrians to engage in risky behavior continues to enjoy credence in the engineering profession. Official memos like FHWA’s 2011 guidance on crosswalk art repeat and endorse the idea, squashing grassroots street safety efforts.

At 11 points in northern Virginia, the familiar straight dashed lines on the road give way to a series of zig zags. The unusual markings, the result of a project from the Virginia Department of Transportation, are meant to alert drivers to be cautious where the W&OD Trail intersects with the road — and bicyclists and pedestrians frequently cross.

Virginia DOT installed these zig zag markings to caution drivers approaching the intersection of a popular walking and biking trail. Image from VDOT.

After a year-long study of this striping treatment, Virginia DOT officials say the markings are effective and should become part of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices — the playbook for American street designers.

VDOT found the zig zag markings slowed average vehicle speeds, increased motorist awareness of pedestrians and cyclists, and increased the likelihood that drivers would yield. They also noted that the effects of the design change didn’t wear off once motorists became used to the it — they still slowed down a year after installation.

This photo shows another style of zig zag pavement marking tested in Virginia. Image from VDOT.

VDOT says the results indicate that zig zag markings are a more cost-effective solution for conflict points between trails and high-speed roads than the current treatments: flashing beacons placed above the road or off to the side.

The zig zag concept was imported from Europe. It is currently used in only two other locations in North America: Hawaii and Ottawa, Ontario. It was one of more than a dozen European traffic management techniques VDOT zeroed in on to test locally.

The zig zag markings reduced motorist speeds approaching the trail at Sterling Road by about 5 mph, according to VDOT. The effect remained strong over time. Graph from Streetsblog.

The W&OD trail is a popular route for both recreation and commuting in the DC metro area. Between 2002 and 2008, there were 21 collisions involving cyclists and two involving pedestrians along the trail, which intersects with major roads at 70 points along its 45-mile path in Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia.

The effect of the zig zag markings was measured using speed radars over the course of a year. Feedback from motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians was also collected using online surveys. While the survey did not come from a random sample, 65 percent of drivers said they were more aware because of the markings and 48 percent said they liked them. The zig zags were also popular with cyclists; 71 percent said the markings affected driver behavior.

Said one respondent: “Drivers rarely stopped before the markings were installed. Since installation, they stop much more often.”

So far, the customer base of American bike-share systems has skewed toward affluent white men. But cities have been working to make the systems more useful and accessible to a broader spectrum of people, and in a new report, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has compiled some of the lessons learned. Here are a few key takeaways:

Cities are gaining more insight into how bike-share can be more useful and accessible to low-income people. All images from NACTO.

The appeal of monthly membership plans

The price of a full 12-month membership can be a barrier for some people. Providing the option of monthly passes or installment plans encourages people across all income levels to try bike-share, NACTO reports.

People who have less predictable personal finances and income benefit from the flexibility of shorter-term memberships, NACTO says. Low-income people are more likely to purchase short-term transit passes, and the same reasoning applies to bike-share.

Although monthly payments can create some uncertainty for bike-share operators, that can be managed with options like auto-renewing monthly passes, NACTO reports. Monthly payments can also serve as a reminder to use the system and boost ridership.

Clearly communicating costs is incredibly important

“Absolute cost is rarely highlighted as a major barrier” in focus groups or anecdotal accounts from bike-share officials, NACTO says. What appears to play a bigger role is uncertainty over what the bike-share service will cost.

A 2012 focus group of Emerson University students found that “the cost of Hubway is not the factor that limits students from using the service, but rather the confusion and inefficient method of making the payments.”

Make payment convenient

One factor that’s often flagged about bike-share systems is making them accessible to the “unbanked” — people without credit or debit cards. About 8 percent of Americans are unbanked, though there is a great deal of variation from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood.

To tackle this problem, Philadelphia offers cash memberships to low-income people. Interestingly, the city found that about a third of people buying cash memberships renewed with credit cards, presumably because it was easier. Still, having the option to make the initial purchase with cash is one less barrier to entry.

Advertise discount membership options on kiosks

Low-income people get most of their information about bike-share directly from the bike-share kiosks, a Philadelphia study found. So if the kiosks only offer informations about daily rates or regular annual rates — and not special discounts for qualifying groups — many people will never know those options are available.

In New York City, anecdotal accounts revealed that many low-income people thought the $9.95 daily rate was the only option and weren’t aware of the reduced price $60 annual membership.

“Improving the information presented on the kiosk — both content and graphic layout — is an important and low-cost way to increase ridership,” NACTO reports.

Provide a physical key

Providing members with a key — the way they do in Philadelphia and Austin— can serve “as a physical reminder that bike-share is available and shortens time spent getting a bike,” NACTO reports.

But if people have to wait too long to receive a key in the mail, that can be a barrier as well. Pronto Bike Share in Seattle can dispense keys for short-term use right from the kiosks.

Make it easy to qualify for membership discounts

Boston is the big national success story on bike-share equity. About 18 percent of its members are low-income, the result, NACTO says, of extensive outreach.

But Boston also makes getting a membership cheap and easy for low-income people. The reduced annual rate is just $5 and Boston does not require those members to prove they qualify for assistance. The program works on the honor system.

Even so, locals don’t think the program is being abused. A review of the program found 64 percent of people paying the discount rate are also “on public assistance,” NACTO reports.

There must be enough stations in low-income neighborhoods to make it worthwhile

If there are just a few scattered stations in low-income neighborhoods, the system won’t provide enough value to low-income people to justify the cost.

Low-income people who do have memberships may use bike-share more than other members

Once low-income people sign up for bike-share, evidence suggests they use it more than affluent subscribers. In Boston last year, low-income men with discounted memberships on average took 18 more trips than men who paid the full cost. And in Philadelphia, cash memberships represent 1 percent of total memberships but 4 percent of trips.

The “forgiving highway” approach to traffic engineering holds that wider is safer when it comes to street design. After decades of adherence to these standards, American cities are now criss-crossed by streets with 12-foot wide lanes. As Walkable City author Jeff Speck argued in CityLab last year, this is actually terrible for public safety and the pedestrian environment.

The rate of side impact crashes is lowest on urban streets with lanes about 10.5 feet wide—much narrower than the standard 12 feet. Graph by Dewan Karim via Streetsblog.

A new study reinforces the argument that cities need to reconsider lane widths and redesign streets accordingly. In a paper to be presented at the Canadian Institute of Traffic Engineers annual conference, author Dewan Masud Karim presents hard evidence that wider lanes increase risk on city streets.

Karim conducted a wide-ranging review of existing research as well as an examination of crash databases in two cities, taking into consideration 190 randomly selected intersections in Tokyo and 70 in Toronto.

Looking at the crash databases, Karim found that collision rates escalate as lane widths exceed about 10.5 feet.

Roads with the widest lanes — 12 feet or wider — were associated with greater crash rates and higher impact speeds. Karim also found that crash rates rise as lanes become narrower than about 10 feet, though this does not take impact speeds and crash severity into account. He concluded that there is a sweet spot for lane widths on city streets, between about 10 and 10.5 feet.

In Toronto, where traffic lanes are typically wider than in Tokyo, the average crash impact speed is also 34 percent higher, Karim found, suggesting that wider lanes not only result in more crashes but in more severe crashes.

The “inevitable statistical outcome” of the “wider-is-safer approach is loss of precious life, particularly by vulnerable citizens,” Karim concluded.

If you’ve checked the news on the subject of American transportation infrastructure lately, you’ve probably heard that the sky is falling. It’s true that Congress can’t get its act together and pass a decent transportation bill, but the amount of money that’s being spent isn’t the problem so much as the fact that we’re spending it on expanding highways instead of keeping the stuff we have in good shape.

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office adds some useful perspective on public infrastructure spending (federal, state, and local, including water infrastructure) since 1956 target. Here are four major takeaways.

Infrastructure Spending is Fairly Stable as a Share of GDP

Measured as a share of Gross Domestic Product, public infrastructure spending has been fairly stable throughout the last six decades at about 2.4 percent, reports the CBO. The most recent bump came in 2009 and 2010 because of the stimulus package, when it rose to 2.7 percent. It has declined somewhat since 2011.

All graphs from the Congressional Budget Office.

But costs have climbed

Beginning in 2003, the cost of raw materials like concrete and asphalt increased more rapidly than the prices of other goods, the CBO reports. So if you factor in these specific costs, inflation-adjusted public infrastructure spending has declined about 9 percent since 2003 (the dark blue line).

Highways Are the Biggest Category of Spending

Of the $416 billion spent on infrastructure by federal, state and local governments in 2014, about 40 percent was dedicated to highways. About 16 percent went to transit and about a third went to water infrastructure.

Spending on Expansion Has Been Moving in the Right Direction

While state DOTs still spend many billions of dollars on highway expansions that erode their ability to maintain existing roads, the situation seems getting better. In recent years, a greater share of public infrastructure spending has been going to maintenance instead of expansion. However, it’s not clear how much this trend applies to highways, since the CBO included transit and water infrastructure in this chart as well.

The US Census only tells us about commuting — a fairly small share of total trips. The more detailed National Household Transportation Survey comes with its own drawbacks: It’s conducted infrequently and doesn’t provide useful data at a local scale.

Without a good sense of people’s active transportation habits, it’s hard to draw confident conclusions not only about walking and biking rates, but also about safety and other critical indicators that can guide successful policy at the local level. A new program from the Federal Highway Administration aims to help fill the gap.

US DOT announced today that FHWA will help local transportation planners gather more sophisticated data on walking and biking. The agency has selected metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in ten regions — Providence, Buffalo, Richmond, Puerto Rico, Palm Beach, Fresno, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Memphis — to lead its new “Bicycle-Pedestrian Count Technology Pilot Program.”

FHWA says the program will provide funding for equipment to measure biking and walking trips. Writing on US DOT’s Fast Lane blog, FHWA Deputy Administrator Gregory Nadeau adds that “each MPO will receive technical assistance in the process of setting up the counters; uploading, downloading and analyzing the data; and —most importantly— using the data to improve the planning process in their community.”

The first counts will be available in December. Following the initial pilot, a second round of regions may be chosen to participate, Nadeau writes.

This would be an enormous improvement over what they do in Cleveland, where I live, as well as many other regions: recruit volunteers to stand at intersections with clipboards once a year and count cyclists by hand.

It might seem like a small thing: reducing motor vehicle speeds 10 miles per hour. But that 10 mph can make an enormous difference for the safety of a street and how comfortable people feel walking or biking there.

A driver’s visual field shrinks as speed increases. Image from Streets.mn.

Bill Lindeke does a great job explaining what he calls “the critical 10″ in a recent post at Streets.mn:

If you look at the average speed of traffic on urban commercial streets, there are a lot of things that begin to change when you slow down cars from the 30 to 35 mile per hour range into the 20 to 25 mile per hour range. Most importantly, perception, reaction time, and crash outcomes are far better at 20 than at 30 mph, while traffic flow doesn’t seem to change very much.

The perception angle is perhaps the most interesting. Driving speed has a dramatic effect on the driver’s “cone of vision.” You can see a lot more detail at 20: people on the sidewalk, a bicyclist in the periphery, or the ‘open’ sign on a storefront. At 30 mph, the window shrinks dramatically.

The same is true for what you might call ‘reaction time. I’ll often talk to drivers about urban bicycling, and they’ll respond with a terrified story about the time that they “almost hit” a bicyclist that “jumped out” at them. And “I didn’t see them” is a common refrain heard by any police officer investigating a crash. The problem is that once you hit 30+ speeds, it’s a lot more difficult to stop in time to make any difference on a potential crash.

These three factors are the big reasons that crash outcomes vary so dramatically on either side of “the critical ten.” It’s no exaggeration to say that lives depend on getting speeds right.

You know it’s time to fight over the federal transportation bill when the fossil fuel-soaked elements of the conservative movement start agitating to stop funding everything except car infrastructure.

As inflation eats away at the gas tax, the Highway Trust Fund is going broke. But a group of conservatives is pretending that the problem is transit and “squirrel sanctuaries.” Image from Brookings.

Yesterday, a coalition of 50 groups, several funded by the Koch brothers, sent a letter to Congress arguing that the way to fix federal transportation funding is to cut the small portion that goes to walking, biking, and transit [PDF]. The signatories do not want Congress to even think about raising the gas tax, which has been steadily eaten away by inflation since 1993.

The billionaire-friendly coalition is trying to play the populist card. Raising the gas tax to pay for roads, they say, is “regressive” because poor people will pay more than rich people if the gas tax is increased. But eliminating all funding for transit, biking, and walking, which people who can’t afford a car rely on? Not a problem to these guys.

“This scorched-earth proposal would eliminate the ability of local transportation agencies to invest in their own transportation priorities and lock us all into a 1950’s — style highway- and car-only mentality that flies in the face of common sense — not to mention economics and what the free market and simple demographics have been telling us for years,” wrote Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists.

Eliminating federal funding for transit would devastate many American cities, where transit agency budgets would be thrown into turmoil. And while federal funding for biking and walking can make a big difference because the infrastructure is so cost efficient, killing those programs won’t affect the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. The savings wouldn’t even be enough to cover the cost of rebuilding a single interchange in Wisconsin.

Congressional Republicans tried this maneuver before during the last transportation bill reauthorization battle, unsuccessfully, although they did eventually whittle away secure funding for programs like Safe Routes to School. That didn’t actually solve any problems, but it was a fine way for the GOP to pretend like the country can go on spending like a drunken sailor on highways.

A raft of recentresearch indicates that young adults just aren’t as into driving as their parents were. Young people today are walking, biking, and riding transit more while driving less than previous generations did at the same age.

Charts from the US Public Interest Research Group.

The vast majority of state DOTs have been loathe to respond by changing their highway-centric ways. A new report by the US Public Interest Research Group, points out the folly of their inaction: If transportation officials are waiting for Americans born after 1983 to start motoring like their parents did, they are likely to be sorely disappointed.

Though some factors underlying the shift in driving habits are likely temporary — caused by the recession, for instance — just as many appear to be permanent, the authors found. That means American transportation agencies should get busy preparing for a far different future than their traffic models predict.

“The Millennial generation is not only less car-focused than older Americans by virtue of being young, but they also drive less than previous generations of young people,” write authors Tony Dutzik, Jeff Inglis, and Phineas Baxandall.

There’s a good deal of evidence that the recession cannot fully explain the trend away from driving among young people. Notably, driving declined even among millennials who stayed employed, and “between the recession years of 2001 and 2009, per-capita driving declined by 16 percent among 16 to 34 year-olds with jobs,” the authors write.

Even as the economy has rebounded, car commuting has declined, and the drop is most pronounced among younger workers. According to the Census, between 2006 and 2013, the share of commutes by driving or carpooling dropped 1.5 percent among workers 16 to 24, 1.3 percent among workers 25 to 44, and 0.5 percent among workers 45 and older. The drop in car commuting among 16- to 24-year-olds continued after the recession ended, though at a slower pace, falling 0.5 percent between 2009 and 2013.

There’s also a big mismatch between the places where the recession hit hardest and the places where driving is dropping the fastest. “The states and urban areas that experienced the biggest increases in unemployment during the recession were generally not those that experienced the greatest declines in VMT,” the authors write.

While economic factors can’t be completely discounted, the authors argue that they are not as significant as longer-term shifts in attitudes. A survey by Deloitte, for example, found that millennials are three times more willing to give up their cars than their parents’ generation. The National Association of Realtors found that today’s young adults are more likely to view a car as “just transportation” and not inherently superior to other modes.

Driving rates peak between the ages of 35 and 55, and millennials will likely drive more as they reach that stage of life, but they will still drive less than their parents did during those years, the authors conclude. Standard traffic models that guide transportation spending decisions and forecast steadily increasing driving rates for years on end fail to account for these shifts.

Dutzik, Inglis, and Baxandall say policy makers need to respond immediately to prepare for a future where Americans aren’t driving more every year. They recommend incorporating a greater degree of uncertainty to projections about how many cars are going to be on the road in the distant future.

Trish Cunningham, 50, killed in Annapolis in 2013. Photo from League of American Bicyclists.

When someone is killed while riding a bike in the United States, the most follow-up you’ll usually see is a newspaper article or two. There’s rarely a trial or a detailed examination of what went wrong.

The federal government tracks bike fatalities, but only to a limited extent. We don’t have great data about the wider story: who’s harmed and what factors are leading to these preventable deaths.

The League of American Bicycists wanted to go deeper. Between February 2011 to February 2013, the organization sifted through hundreds of cases from across the country. Using newspaper and television reports and blogs, they were able to get a closer look at 628 individual cases and tease out some patterns.

The cases they examined don’t account for every bike fatality during the study period (more like a third of them), but they are instructive. The League also supplemented its research with data from the NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

Fatalities were concentrated on high-speed “arterials” designed to speed motor vehicle traffic through urban areas. The second most frequent road category for cycling fatalities was local streets in urban areas.

Data from NHTSA.

2. The most common type of crash was being struck from behind

In 40 percent of the cases, the victim was struck from behind. The second-most common category was T-bone crashes, which accounted for 10 percent of fatal crashes. Head-on collisions (8 percent) and right-hook crashes, where the driver makes a right turn into a traveling straight (6 percent), were relatively less common.

Data from the League of American Bicyclists.

3. In urban areas, cyclists were more likely to be killed at intersections

Cyclists traveling in rural areas were 3.7 times more likely to be struck and killed at a location that was not an intersection than urban cyclists.

4. Most victims were wearing a helmet

In the 150 cases where helmet use was cited in a crash account, 57 percent of the victims were wearing a helmet.

5. Penalties varied based on the age and gender of the victim

Using news reports, it was only possible to track sentencing in a limited number of cases. Nevertheless, the Bike League found that harsher sentences were handed down to motorists who killed female cyclists, and to motorists who killed cyclists between the ages of 20 and 30.

6. If more people bike in your state, you’re less likely to be killed

The national fatality rate was 8.6 deaths per 10,000 regular commuters, between 2008 and 2012. In every state — except Florida — higher than average bike commuting rates translated to lower fatality risk.

7. Media reports about bike crashes are flawed

Working from press accounts to compile data on bike crashes can be tricky, because as the League notes, stories tend to be told from the survivor’s perspective. Basic facts like who had the right of way are often overlooked, and crashes are often presented in a manner that exculpates the motorist.

8. States aren’t tracking cycling fatalities very uniformly, if at all, which limits progress

Of the top 10 states for cycling, eight were tracking cycling collisions, but they weren’t all tracking crash type or motorist and cyclist information, and they weren’t collecting information uniformly across states. Without this type of data, the Bike League says, it’s difficult to determine whether road safety is improving and whether certain policies are improving outcomes.

]]>Fri, 23 May 2014 14:25:00 +0000Angie Schmitt (Guest Contributor)The American cities with the most growth in car-free householdshttps://ggwash.org/view/33531/the-american-cities-with-the-most-growth-in-car-free-households
https://ggwash.org/view/33531/the-american-cities-with-the-most-growth-in-car-free-households

The Washington metropolitan area is tied with New York for the 3rd-largest increase in car-free households over 5 years. Angie Schmitt summarizes a new analysis:

Data from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

The highest rate of vehicle ownership in America occurred in 2007, when the average household owned 2.07 vehicles, according to research by Michael Sivak for the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Recently, the average number of cars per household dipped below 2 — at the end of 2012, it was 1.98.

That’s in part because a growing number of American households — especially in big cities — don’t own a car at all anymore. In 2012 — the latest year in which data was available — 9.2 percent of American households lacked a motor vehicle. That’s compared to 8.7 percent in 2007, according to Sivak’s review of Census data.

The share of car-free households varies considerably among the 30 largest American cities, from 56.5 percent in New York to 5.8 percent in San Jose. But between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of car-free households grew in 21 of those 30 cities. The change was especially pronounced in cities where a lot of people were already getting by without cars. The 13 cities with the highest proportion of car-free households in 2007 all saw an increase between then and 2012, reports Sivak.

Not all cities are seeing an increase in car-free households. Denver, Dallas, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio, and Columbus all bucked the trend, registering slight increases. Dallas registered no change.

Growth in car-free households reflects a number of local factors, including the quality of transit, walkability, and income levels, among other factors, according to Sivak. But he says wider social trends are at work as well.

This study is the latest in a series examining trends in driving behavior for the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute — which is funded in part by auto companies. Sivak’s previous research has shown that in addition to owning fewer cars, Americans are driving less miles and consuming less fuel.

Sivak points out that all of these trends predate the recent economic crisis, suggesting they are the result of wider cultural influences, such as the rise in telecommuting, increasing urbanization, and changing preferences of young people.

The amount of Federal-Aid Highway money given to each state per dollar contributed to the Highway Account of the Highway Trust Fund for fiscal years 2005-2009. Image from GAO.

But while that might sound great, the truth is it’s bad news no matter where you live. This was only possible because the roughly $200 billion in Federal-Aid spending over that time period included $30 billion from the general fund — a trend that presents some rather obvious sustainability concerns, to say nothing of equity for non-drivers.

“A significant amount of highway funding is no longer provided by highway users,” GAO stated in the report.

Discrepancies in “rate-of-return” were also mitigated by the 2005 SAFETEA-LU which offered an “equity bonus” to donor states. The program guaranteed a minimum return to states, resulting in a higher rate-of-return for all states, and as much as a 25 percent increase for some.

That doesn’t mean funding discrepancies have been eliminated, as the map above illustrates.

Despite the fact that all states received more money than they contributed to the program, some 28 still receive a relatively lower rate than 22 others, GAO reported: “Thus, depending on the method of calculation, the same state can appear to be either a donor or donee state.”

The donor-donee issue has been a bone of contention in the federal reauthorization process and part of the conservative push for greater state-level control of transportation funding decisions. By claiming that their state is a “donor” state, some argue that their state should retain full control over its transportation funds, without federal decision-making or any cross-subsidy of other states’ transportation needs. In essence, they would wind down the federal program and all national transportation aims, in exchange for autonomous state-by-state transportation programs.

But GAO cautions that over-emphasis on rate-of-return issues can distract from more essential concerns for the country’s surface transportation program. For this reason, GAO lists the Federal-Aid Highways program on its “at-risk” list.

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), ranking member of the House Transportation Committee, hopes the new information will throw water on the contentious issue and help streamline the reauthorization process. In a press release, Rahall had this to say:

Instead of being consumed by the parochial ‘donor’ and ‘donee’ debate, this GAO report confirms that Congress should be working toward crafting a surface transportation bill that meets the needs of a 21st century national transportation system. Using rate of return as our rationale for how we spend our limited transportation dollars simply detracts from the national focus when we ought to look at the larger picture and determine what investments best help create American jobs and grow our economy.